The use of 3GPP LTE systems (including LTE and LTE-Advanced systems) has increased due to both an increase in the types of devices user equipment (UEs) using network resources as well as the amount of data and bandwidth being used by various applications, such as video streaming, operating on these UEs. As a result, 3GPP LIE systems continue to develop, with the next generation wireless communication system, 5G, to improve access to information and data sharing. 5G looks to provide a unified network/system that is able to meet vastly different and sometime conflicting performance dimensions and services driven by disparate services and applications while maintaining compatibility with legacy UEs and applications.
Various techniques continue to be developed to increase the amount of data able to be conveyed between an evolved NodeB (eNB) and UEs. In particular, the recent expansion of communications into mmWave and unlicensed spectrum bands has enabled the use of carrier aggregation (CA) in increasing the amount of data by increasing the data rate and/or the number of UEs serviced by the eNB. However, one of the issues with the use of mmWave bands is that the pathloss for such frequencies (in the range of 30 GHz) is extremely high compared with previously employed frequencies (3GHz or less). This may also increase interference caused by the multipath and fading effects. To combat this, a large antenna array may be used to increase the array gain and/or beamforming may be used. While channel rank may be used to distinguish among the beams, in certain circumstances, the number of transmit antennae may be smaller than the maximum number of supportable streams. This issue may be aggravated with the use of Cooperative Multipoint (CoMP) transmissions to increase communication coverage. It may be desirable to enhance hybrid beamforming in CoMP systems, especially in dual transmission point (TP) CoMP systems.